Not necessarily. The term “anti-feminist,” as it’s usually used in medieval and Renaissance studies, just means “anti-woman”; it doesn’t assume the existence of the sort of ideology we would call feminism. And there’s definitely plenty of “anti-feminist” writing – i.e., diatribes against women – from this period.
My personal opinion is that, for the most part, we’ll never know for certain who out of past historical figures was gay. Why? Because they didn’t think of things that way. Oh certainly some people spoke of those with inclinations towards one sex or another, but the concept of innate orientation was not widely tossed around and people certainly applied no labels to themselves.
I believe that the percentages of those who, if placed in today’s world, would identify as gay/straight/bi were roughly equal, but this identification we speak of was a foreign concept to most people even eighty years ago. There was a lot of cross-over and fuzziness in the lines during the 1920s. Straight men slept with gay men, gay men slept with straight women, straight women slept with lesbians, etc. etc. ad nauseum. The crossover seems to slow down and stop sometime within the Great Depression to the 50s. The increased hostility towards sexual activity with the same sex solidified the lines between somewhat artificial categories of straight and gay.
The only people we can know with any sort of certainty about, orientation-wise, during these times would be the people who formed what are clearly life-long romantic attractions to another person of the same sex (The Emperor Hadrian comes to mind) or those who were known to continuous or semi-continuous sex with partners of the same gender (Oscar Wilde, although there is evidence for his actually being bisexual). Even then cases can be made against.
Sure. But the comment I was talking about is “does being open and free (as artists usually are) lead one to be more sexually open?” Even if some will argue homosexuality is related to artistic ability, I don’t think art leads to homosexuality. 
No, but a whore would. Until the last hundred years or so, prostitutes were commonly used as artists models.
I think its probobly in no ones interests to tie ablity to sexual orientation.
You gotta suffer to sing the blues.
Pain is the fuel for art. Not all art, granted. Kenny G, for instance, has probably never had a hangnail. But if you want to seek out a common thread that binds artists of all generations and all cultures, pain is it.
Now, I’m not saying that homosexuality equals pain. In cultures where homosexuality is completely accepted, I’d imagine that there would be no statistical correlation between artistic endeavors and sexual orientation. But when you’re a member of a minority that the rest of society denigrates, you have to find an outlet for that pain somewhere.
Art is a medium by which people can express their feelings; art is all about emotion. Being gay in a culture that views gay people with hostility creates an enormous amount of emotional conflict. Love someone, and you earn society’s hatred, or shut yourself down and pretend and long for love desperately; however you approach it, there’s bound to be pain. If you have talent, and skill, you can express that pain through art.
Should homosexuality become accepted in society, I’d guess that eventually gay people will lose their reputation for being artistically inclined. A small loss, more than completely offset by the gain in overall human happiness.
As to those who are staunchly defending Michelangelo’s heterosexuality… why? Does it pain you so much to think that a great man was gay? There’s quite a bit of evidence to support the contention that he was attracted to other men, that he had a long infatuation with Tommaso Cavalieri among others.
Certainly it’s impossible to determine for absolute certain what a historical figure’s sexual orientation was in the absence of concrete evidence. Homosexuality rarely leaves concrete evidence, however; when your life can be destroyed if it’s determined that you’re gay, you don’t tend to leave your coming-out speech carved in stone.
Scholars speculate on artists’ families, their careers, their husbands and wives, their travels, their education, their health, all in order to better understand the influences that drove each artist to create their body of work. Speculation on their sexual orientation is not only inevitable, it’s vital. What’s more important to a person’s aesthetic than who they love?
So we go sifting back through whatever history has left to us, looking for clues as to who the people behind the work were. And we sometimes come up with the idea that part of what informed the art was love which was forbidden.
Heterosexuals have all of history to be proud of, at least according to them. In the same way that paintings of Jesus in caucasian society always portray him as a white man, history written in heterocentric societies portrays everyone in the past as straight. God forbid we point to evidence that some great artist or writer might have their sexuality in common with us; everyone knows that in order to be a genius, you have to be hetero, right?
Given how much heart and soul he put into it, I doubt Mike had to be dragged kickign and screaming into the chapel. Look, in that day and age, publci figures paid for work and their patronized artists did it.
If someone asks for a cite, I don’t think I can provide any, but for whatever it’s worth I’ve never bought into this line of thinking. Plenty of artists suffer, plenty don’t. Art expresses more than just pain.
Italian Renaissance is my minor area, not my specialty, but I’ll have a go anyway…
It is always a bit risky to identify a past individual’s sexuality according to modern definitions of what is “gay” or “straight.” A man who remains a life-long bachelor is not necessarily homosexual; conversely, not every man who is married to a woman is necessarily heterosexual. Unless one has reliable evidence of sexual acts or feelings–as might be accounted in a personal diary or in a passionate love letter–it’s not possible to conclude decisively that any historical figure was gay, straight, or bi.
Now, some individuals do leave behind lots of documentary evidence. Others leave behind very little. Michelangelo kind of falls in the middle. There is not a single document that can prove beyond any doubt that Michelangelo had sexual relations with anyone, man or woman. However, he did leave behind some literary documents as well as a mountain of visual documents in the forms of sculptures and paintings.
The problem with these documents is that they’re primarily artistic in shape. Renaissance artists typically did not regard art as a means for expressing deeply-held personal feelings–artworks were primarily seen as fulfilling particular societal purposes (this is why so much of Renaissance art consists of religious images), and in making these images, certain artistic conventions were followed. The same problem applies to Michelangelo’s sonnets, the style of which conform very closely to traditional courtly love poetry.
Nevertheless, you can always recognize a Michelangelo as a Michelangelo. While he respects several artistic conventions (particularly the classical ideal of the human figure, as revived by predecessors like Nicola Pisano and Jacopo della Quercia), he also brings something new to Renaissance art that indicates strongly individualistic traits. Taken together, Michelangelo’s work suggests certain patterns that have been interpreted as homosexual in tone.
The most obvious pattern is Michelangelo’s clear love for the male body, and his relative disinterest in the female body (as pointed out by jovan and others above). While the use of male models for female figures isn’t homosexual–that was a common practice in Renaissance studios–the fact that Michelangelo just didn’t feminize his female figures very much speaks volumes about his personal aesthetic preferences when it came to the human body.
And then there are the sonnets that he wrote for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman who many scholars believe Michelangelo was in love with. While the sonnets may have been fairly conventional in style, Michelangelo certainly showered Cavalieri with them and with other gifts, including a number of drawings, several of which feature fairly erotic images, such as the classic homoerotic theme of Zeus and Ganymede.
Cavalieri never seems to have reciprocated Michelangelo’s interest, and it’s very unlikely that they ever had any sexual relationship.
While there are a few art historians who deny that Michelangelo was gay–James Beck, for instance–most Renaissance scholars believe that he was probably gay, or at least held homosexual preferences. Admittedly, the evidence is a bit sketchy, but the patterns in his work do suggest that he was more oriented toward male beauty than female beauty. If one’s sexual identity can only be defined in regard to actual sexual acts, however, it’s impossible to define Michelangelo as gay or straight.
In any case, I’d say that the fallacy in the OP is not in the question of Michelangelo’s sexuality, but rather in the notion that artists are normally “open and free” in their social behavior. This idea of the artist-as-bohemian is fairly modern. While the question of sexuality’s role in creativity might have relevance to our modern idea of the artist, it doesn’t really apply to Renaissance artists, who were more often than not regarded as craftsmen rather than as creative geniuses. Michelangelo did do something to challenge this idea, but, then, he was Michelangelo–he was an exception to the general rule.